=Yesterday huge crowds gathered in the Polish city of Krakow, the city in which John Paul II was cardinal before ascending to the papacy. Waterside parish priest the Rev Ray Lyons had prebooked a holiday to Krakow. He described by phone the amazing scenes he has witnessed to the Daily Echo...

I FIRST came to Krakow ten years ago in the aftermath of communism and we decided to take our Easter break here to see the changes but also because it is the home town of Karol Wojtyla.

We came to see the place that made the man.

Shakespeare wrote 'All the world's a stage' and from 1978 the world has been his stage, but it was here as a drama student under Nazi occupation that he learned his craft.

We arrived on Monday to a city in profound shock and mourning.

Everyone wore black.

Throughout the week, outside Bishop's House, they kept vigil day and night. Sometimes maybe only 1,000 but in the late evening as many as 20,000 in hushed reverence.

Then maybe a small group would join hands in a circle in prayer and somebody would begin a decade of the rosary.

Then a voice would begin a Taize chant and the whole crowd would take it up.

Prayer in its many forms for a great man of prayer.

On Tuesday evening, 150,000 young people took part in a spontaneous candlelit procession across the city.

This is a city of young people. It is hard to believe but you hardly see a grey head.

They have led all the way through. This has not been the Church or officialdom, it has been the young people - most of whom weren't even born when he became Pope.

It reminds me of the UK when Diana died but it's profoundly more spiritual than that.

There is a garden of coloured candles - tens of thousands of candles, flowers and football scarves - outside Bishop's House.

On Wednesday night I stood outside Bishop's House among the silent throng of 20,000.

Quietly a young woman nearby sang the first line of a Polish hymn and suddenly it was like a throng of angels singing exquisitely.

On Thursday evening I took part in the procession from the city centre to the football stadium, of more than one million people, for a candlelit vigil mass for the dead.

Yesterday the city came to a halt as 300,000 watched the funeral in the park and another 20,000 outside Bishop's House.

I watched it on CNN and also in both locations.

You could hear a pin drop in either place. It was absolute silence.

They followed it as if they were there, in prayer they joined in, but unlike Rome there was no clapping.

Now the city is beginning to awaken to the reality of his absence.

They have mourned, they have prayed for his soul. Now they hope for his resurrection and the day he is proclaimed a saint, as did the crowd in St Peter's Square.

There is disappointment that he is not coming home, but they are coming to terms with the fact that he was not just a great Polish leader but a great world and Christian leader.

His heart will always be in Krakow but now he belongs to the world.

The holiday has become a pilgrimage for me. This is the fourth papal funeral I have watched but I have seen nothing like it before.

Yesterday's Daily Echo wrongly identified the Pope in a photograph of an international students' football team. The picture, which hangs in a Southampton church, features Pope John Paul II on the extreme left of the front row.